A History of the Universe in 60 Million Galaxies

The March talk will be given by Dr Seshadri Nadathur who will be talking about his research into the history of the universe and fundamental physics.

In this talk he will describe the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, which is a survey using a telescope on a desert mountaintop to create a precise map of the positions of 60 million galaxies, and how he uses this map to measure the faint remnants of ripples imprinted at the Big Bang itself. He then uses these measured patterns to deduce how the Universe has been expanding at different points in its history, stretching back to over 11 billion years ago – this has told us something very unexpected and exciting about “dark energy”, the mysterious substance that has been driving this expansion to get faster and faster with time.

Seshadri is an Associate Professor of Cosmology at the University of Portsmouth. He is an observational cosmologist using data gathered by large and wonderful telescopes – one in a desert on Earth, another a million miles out in space – to measure the structure of the Universe on the very largest scales, and thus to understand fundamental physics.